President Donald Trump’s administration is deploying two hundred U.S. soldiers to help Nigeria combat decades-long terrorism by Islamic extremists.

Weeks after the U.S. airstrikes in Sokoto, Mr Trump gave the approval for the American military to provide combat training to Nigerian forces at President Bola Tinubu’s request, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Mr Trump approved the deployment of 200 U.S. troops to train the Nigerian military in “air and infantry operations” and other strategies to gather intelligence and eliminate Boko Haram terrorists and other insurgents, the newspaper reported Tuesday.

“The terrorist activity in West Africa—and Nigeria specifically—is something we’re incredibly concerned with,” the spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command said in the report. “We want to partner with capable and willing partners that are able to address these shared security concerns.”

The troops are scheduled to land in Nigeria in the “coming weeks” and will “provide training and technical guidance for Nigerian troops”. They will help the Nigerian military to coordinate simultaneous air and infantry operations.

Major-General Samaila Uba, spokesperson for the Nigerian Armed Forces, clarified that the U.S. troops “aren’t going to be involved in direct combat or operations”.

Since Mr Trump redesignated Nigeria a country of particular concern over what was described as the genocide of Christians in late 2025, Mr Tinubu has had the jitters, scrambling to burnish his sullied reputation in Washington with $9 million paid to a Republican lobbyist.

Mr Tinubu has insisted that the killings of Christians were not necessarily religiously motivated but a crisis between herders and farmers. 

Still, Mr Tinubu has gone to extra lengths to communicate his administration’s willingness to work with the U.S. government to root out Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists. 

The Nigerian leader had a meeting with U.S. General R.M Dagvin Anderson in Rome last year, during which they both agreed “to work together”.

The APC government’s most recent overture happened on Friday when the first lady, Remi Tinubu, praised Mr Trump on Fox TV for bombing terrorist enclaves in the North-East last December, describing it as a blessing. She called for more U.S. military strikes in Nigeria.